Sequence decoding

[tristan_bethe]

Hi!

I am an 3D artist that deals with lots of sequences of images that need to go to different places and different formats. So when I found FFAStrans yesterday and watched a basic tutorial on it (youtube.com/watch?v=RMISBx6iSeQ) I was very exited!

However if I understand correctly by reading the different post on the forum (/forum/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=170&p=250&hilit=sequence#p255) there is not yet a way to read in sequences easily. At least not on my level easy anyways.

Basically there is no standard of dealing with sequences and I assume there is none in the latest version of FFAStrans? (I am very new to this)

The trouble is that FFAStrans needs to know what belongs to the sequence and when is it complete. Some kind of receipt needs to be added?

For users of 3ds Max this feature has always been included. There is a new way and a legacy way and the latter seem more useful actually. Let me show both:

The new way
https://knowledge.autodesk.com/support/ ... D-htm.html


The legacy way
The Autodesk help actually tells of another part of max using IFL in another way, be aware:https://knowledge.autodesk.com/support/ ... 1-htm.html



You can download both lists here: humanalloy.com/ImageLists.zip
Not an actual a standard I know. Could there be a way that FFAStrans could make a file list if you ask it to? Maybe after a certain timeout. When no new files are added to this folder for 60 minutes, generate a file list. Then we could use that list in the rest of the sequence. For me personally that timeout could be a minute since I would be copying all renders in the folder at once.

Secretly I am hoping loading in sequences is all ready incorporated and I typed this all for nothing

[tristan_bethe]

Actually I see Adobe Media Encoder does something similar:




It waits a certain time and then treats a sequence (everything with numbers on the end) as the input.

[admin]

Hi tristan_bethe, thank you for using FFAStrans and welcome to the forum!

The approach described in your forum-link would still be the preffered method. As you exactly pointed out, you need a kind of recipe file written at the end the sequence. Without it FFAStrans would simply not know when to stop looking for new files added to the sequence. So as for now, FFAStrans is not sequence aware. However, the next version will have some features to help you in this regard. F.ex. you will be able to read the recipe file "00078Darion001_Render.imsq" and extract frame rate, base file name, and other kinds of xml-data and store them in variables for later use. That way you can contruct a custom ffmpeg command to read and convert your sequence.

Other than that I have been thinking of writing a sequence monitor but it has not been given any priority yet.

-steinar